They say you don’t actually feel yourself die. That’s bullshit.
The pain was monumental, and then it was just… gone. The last thing I felt was the pressure of Finn’s hands on my thigh, the torn artery pulsing against his palm, the blood bubbling up hot and then cold and then nothing at all. I wanted to say something—classic last words, something pithy like “Tell my ex-wife I never missed her”—but the words wouldn’t come, and I didn’t have an ex-wife, anyway. Maybe I’d already said them. Or maybe my synapses had just gone on strike.
After that, there was nothing but the dark.
Not that I’d ever expected a parade of angels or a warm golden light or any of that crap, but it seemed like, I don’t know, maybe a transition would have been nice. I’d been a combat medic. I’d stitched up more bodies than I could count, cracked more ribs than the Dairyville BBQ joint. When people died on you, even if it was ugly, there was always a moment. A shift. Something. Here, there was only the dark. I waited for the light atthe end of the tunnel, but all I got was a long, echoing silence, the kind that fills up an ER waiting room at three a.m. after a code black.
This is how it ends? Not with a bang, not with a wolf howl, but with my ass in the dirt and a hole in my leg? Great.
My thoughts were running, but they kept tripping over themselves, derailing into dead ends and weird loops. Was this what dying was? An endless run of shitty reruns and half-remembered dreams? I tried to focus, but everything slipped away like a suture in greasy gloves.
For a while, I was convinced I’d hallucinated the last few minutes. Maybe there had never been a demon war. Maybe Brie wasn’t even real. Maybe I was just some loser in Amarillo, half-mad from too many surgeries, finally losing the plot for good. My brain rolled through every highlight of my career: the time I set a broken tibia with nothing but a tire iron and duct tape, the time I stitched up Bronc’s scalp in the back of a moving F-150, the time I saved my own damn life by yanking a knife out of my own shoulder. Not a single one of those stories would impress anyone on the other side. There probably wasn’t even another side.
After a while, the cold went away. Not because I was warm, but because I was gone. I floated above the ground, a spectator in my own post-mortem, and watched the others with a kind of disinterested awe. Finn was holding my hand, but it looked like he was holding a dead fish. Aspen was crying. The prairie dog was, for some reason, flipping me off. Kazimir was talking, but it was all white noise, like a news anchor with the sound muted.
I wanted to scream at them: I’m not done! Put me back! There’s still work to do. But the words evaporated.
There was supposed to be a bright light. There’s always a light, right? I’d watched a million hospital dramas. There was always a tunnel, a golden glow, a choir. I waited for it. I waited for a soft voice, a memory of my mother, maybe the sound of rain. But all I got was a static buzz and the echo of my own voice, bitching about the lack of amenities.
Seriously. Does everything always have to be fucked up? I killed a bunch of demons, then tore my femoral artery on a jagged edge of a fucking rock, and I don’t even get the courtesy of a proper afterlife? Kill me. Oh, wait. Guess it did.
I waited some more. Time doesn’t mean much when you’re a ghost or whatever I was, but it felt like hours. Maybe minutes. Maybe it was just one long, stretched-out second. I was no longer watching the scene. I was just here. In the dark. Waiting for what, I didn’t know.
Then I heard the voice.
It came from somewhere above, or maybe inside my skull. Female, the vowels rounded and old-world. There was a smile in it, the kind that meant trouble.
“Wake up, Ryder Lowrey. I’m not finished with you yet.”
I’d recognize that accent anywhere, even if you stuck me in a sensory deprivation tank and force-fed me cold borscht for a month. Russian, but the kind of Russian that got you thrown out of St. Petersburg for being too beautiful and too deadly for polite society.
Lucia Kozlov.
I’d been dodging her for years. Not that it was personal, exactly. It was just that wolves and vampires didn’t mix, not in a way that ended well for anyone involved. Sure, the MC did business with her family, and I’d played at her father’s club from time to time, but that didn’t mean you had to get cozy. But here she was, cutting through the darkness with a few syllables.
I tried to ignore her. Maybe if I pretended to be a better corpse, she’d go away.
Instead, I felt the air shift—sharp, like booze, or the moment before you take a really good punch to the face. There was a pressure, a hand on my chest, and for a moment I thought she was trying to crush my ribs in.
“Come on, Ryder. Don’t make me force you.”
That was definitely Lucia. Nobody else called me by my first name unless they wanted something, and Lucia always wanted something.
I tried to answer, but my mouth wouldn’t work. There was no mouth. There was no body. I was just the sum total of all my bitching and moaning, drifting like smoke.
“You are not dead, not yet. Do you hear me?”
No, I wanted to say. I do not hear you. Fuck off. Let me die in peace.
She laughed, a quick bark. “If you die, you will make it too easy for them. You are not coward, Ryder. I have seen you fight.”
I wanted to protest, but she was right. I hated losing, and I hated quitting. But what was I supposed to do? Will my arteries back together? Rub some dirt on it? Walk it off?
“Try harder,” she said, and I could swear there was a smile in her voice.
Suddenly, I felt the cold again, but this time it was mixed with heat. Liquid fire surged up my thigh and into my chest, setting every nerve ending alight. The pain was so real, so raw, I almost wanted the darkness back. Then the pain faded, replaced by a slow, steady thumping.
My heart. It was still beating.
